Darkness Falls
by Kefalion
Summary: Harry's been to the healers and been given sad news. He's going blind. This will change his life. What he can do. There's no cure. But Neville won't accept that. If there isn't one yet, they just have to find it.


This story was written for the **Finals **of the Seventh Season of the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition. I'm writing as **Chaser 2 **for **The Tutshill Tornados**.

**The Name of the Round: **A Different Kind of Magic

Each position was given a book containing a different kind of magic to that of the HP universe. Our task was to take an element of one of these stories and use it as inspiration.

**CHASER 2:** These Rebel Waves — Sara Raasch. I've decided to focus on the magic of plants/herbology.

These are the prompts I'm using as a chaser to score some extra points:  
4\. [word] Blind  
6\. [Object] An old photograph  
10\. [character] Neville Longbottom

**Disclaimer:** I don't own any part of the world J.K. Rowling has created. It's all hers, from Diagon Alley to Hogwarts to all the people living there.

Thanks to my phenomenal team for betaing! The Finals. Oh yes. Thank you for sticking through until the very end. I'm proud to have been a part of this team.

**WARNING/info:** character going blind

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**Darkness Falls  
**_Words: 1 464_

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Whenever Harry is alone, he pulls out an old photograph that he always carries with him and stares at it, the healer's words ring in his head.

_Blind._

He looks at the photograph with and without glasses. Without, it's no blurrier than it ever was. He can make out his mother's red hair, the heavy winter her clothes they're both wearing, and the smiles on their faces. With glasses, the lines of the photograph are as crisp as they've ever managed to be. He can make out the silver clasps on his father's robes, their eye colours, and the snow falling gently in the background.

There's nothing to indicate that his eyesight is getting worse, that it will fail completely one day.

Nothing aside from how poorly he can navigate in the dark. Nothing aside from failing the tests on his peripheral vision, how people startle him because he's relying on knowing that they're there in the corner of his eye, but unable to see them until they're facing him.

His work has been suffering for some time, though he's thought nothing of it.

Magic is supposed to fix things. All unmagical ailments are supposed to be treatable. A flick of a wand, a potion, a herb or some combined regimen should cure him, or at the very least stop his eyesight from deteriorating, yet the healer said that there is no cure. Nothing to be done.

With a strained smile, Harry asked about replacements, the swirling blue eye of Mad-Eye Moody coming to mind. The healer had given him an equally strained smile in reply, saying that the problem lay not with his eyes, but in his brain, and that wasn't so easily replaced.

Harry's told nobody yet. He can't bear it. Can't bear to see the pity in their eyes. A hysterical laugh hacks its way up his throat. He'll not have to see the pity for long at least.

He hides his head in his hands, mindful of the photograph he's still holding, its edges fragile with age and too much handling. He looks at it again, determined to commit it to memory. He has a lot of things he needs to commit to memory. The pattern of freckles across Ginny's nose. The pout little James makes when he's forced to eat his vegetables. Albus's toothless smile.

-:-:-

There are a lot of people he should tell. His boss. His wife. His best friends. Yet whenever he tries, it's not blindness that's his main affliction, it's muteness. And when two months had passed since he got the diagnosis, Neville ends up the first person he tells, and the lack of pity makes Harry glad of it. They're meeting at the Leaky Cauldron, sat at the bar. The light low, and it's easy, too easy, to pretend that they're all alone, all other patrons indistinct in the shadows.

"They're saying they can't cure it?"

"Yes. That's the word."

Neville frowns deeply as if he doubts his hearing and wants to ask for clarification a second time. "But… won't they try to find a cure?"

"I don't think they have the time to spend on one man, not when it's not something terminal."

"But you're Harry Potter. It should give you some special treatment."

"I've probably told them off for giving me special treatment so many times that they've started to listen. Just my luck, huh."

"Well, if they won't try, I will."

"Thanks."

"You don't believe me. You don't believe I can succeed."

Harry clasps Neville's shoulder. "It's not that I don't believe you or don't believe _in_ you. You're great, mate, really. It's just…"

"You don't dare hope."

Harry smiles sadly. "Yeah, something like that. What are you planning to do, though?"

"Did you know that there are an estimated eighty thousand plants left to be discovered in the world? Many of them magical and with properties that can be used for healing. One of them has to do the trick. I'm not saying that it'll be easy to discover it, and once that's done, it won't be easy to find the best way to use it, but I know beyond certainty that the answer is out there."

"Damn if you aren't giving me some hope. Just for that, I think you owe me another pint."

-:-:-

When Harry looks at his father's face in the old photograph, he can't make out his mother's. He's gained tunnel vision, and the little area in the centre of his sight which remains clear has grown noticeably smaller in the last month. At first, the deterioration happened slowly. Little changed in the first five years after he was diagnosed, and now it's happening all at once, and he is forced to disclose it to his family and colleagues.

Ginny yells at him. Curses at him for keeping it secret for so long. She hits him, fists hammering at his chest. Then she hugs him hard, tears soaking the front of his shirt.

Hermione interrogates him better than any experienced Auror could have, demanding every little detail he knows about the condition and then storms off to find Neville to join him in his research, taking a leave of absence from work to pursue a cure.

Ron is more subdued, providing silent support and no reproach, a much-needed contrast to the others' reactions.

At work, Harry is consigned to desk work, having become a liability, a danger even, in the field, and that is fine. As long as he can go into the office every morning some normality remains in his life. He fears, however, that the day when he won't be able to do paperwork is fast approaching. He has to peer at the papers, holding them mere inches away from his face to make out the letters. It's not sustainable.

He's been given books on magic for blind people, but he's stubbornly refused to read them, and soon he won't be able to. It will be too late to learn how to have them read out loud to him, too late to learn how to transform them into Braille. Not that he knows how to read that anyway.

The frequent conversations he has with Neville and Hermione, who are off in some jungle or another, hunting for new plants keep the spark of hope that Neville had lit all those years ago alive, and that is what allows him to remain so stupidly stubborn.

-:-:-

The Floo rushes to life, the green flames properly visible to Harry, one of the few things that still are, and Neville tumbles out into the Potter living room bringing along a scent of chlorophyll and dirt.

"We got it! I got it!"

Neville presses something into Harry's hands. Its surface tells him that it's probably shiny. It's very smooth as he runs his fingers over the small ridges of the spherical object. It's a dark colour. He can't tell which. Not that it matters. What matters are the next words Neville says.

"It's a tree nut with the most amazing healing properties I've ever seen in any plant. We could distil it. Use it in a potion or make an ointment. Don't know which will work best yet. We'll figure it out. For now, just eat it raw. It's quick-working. Here, I'll remove the shell."

Neville takes it back. There's a crack, and then he gives it to Harry again.

"Go on. Eat it. It's safe. I promise."

Harry chews and swallows so fast that he almost chokes. Hope burns brightly in his chest.

One heartbeat.

Two.

Three.

Four, and…

It's not clear, but he can make out the grin on Neville's face, shapes and colours swimming before his eyes were mostly darkness had been before.

Summoning his glasses, which he'd given up on, and pressing them onto his nose, he can see.

Neville's grin is distinctly smug. His face is lined with wrinkles and his hair is turning grey.

Then things blur and fear cramps around Harry's heart.

"Hey, hey, it's okay. You don't need to cry."

Neville has pulled him into a bear hug, and Harry realised that it's tears now that make things hard to see. Not to speak of the shoulder his face is pressed into.

He'll be able to see his children's faces for the first time in years. He can go back to being an Auror. And…

He draws back from Neville and pulls out the old photograph of his parents. He's used it to measure how well he can see and it's better than it was when he was doing desk work, as good as it was back when he was only twenty years old, and so the tears make everything hazy again.

"Thank you," he says, hugging Neville. "Thank you so much."

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**The End**

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**A/N 26th November 2019:**

Hope you liked the story. With this, the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition is over for this season. Don't know what I'll write next.


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